Critical Investigation of Purposeful Ibn Taymiya’s Consensus-Making for Reducing Alawids’ Status

The two main Islamic denominations agree on the multiplicity of Imam Ali’s virtues, and most Muslims do not deny hundreds of the Prophet’s sayings on Imam Ali. Although most Sunnites disagree with Shiites on the interpretation of those traditions, denying their denotation of those traditions to Imam Ali’s Imamate, few persons had denied, due to certain prejudices, those virtues. Ibn Taymiya Harrani, the founder of Salafism, is one of the best known among them. In addition to denying the rightness of most of those traditions, he has made great effort to show a consensus among his predecessors in denying Imam Ali’s virtues. The important question is whether his claims regarding a consensus among Muslim scholars on the abovementioned issue is true or not. The present article uses a descriptive-analytical method to deal with the subject and relies on the Sunnites’ sources to prove the falsity of those claims.